Film
Between Two Worlds review - Juliette Binoche, maid in FranceFriday, 27 May 2022
For die-hard Juliette Binoche fans – don’t cross us, we get angry – Between Two Worlds is heaven. The French star hardly ever leaves the screen during the film’s 106 minutes. It was her unwavering detemination that ensured the film came to be made... Read more... |
Luzzu review - a Maltese fisherman struggles with modernityFriday, 27 May 2022
In Maltese-American Alex Camilleri’s debut feature, it’s a case of follow the swordfish. This terrifically atmospheric, almost documentary-like film – Camilleri cites Italian neo-realism, including Visconti’s La Terra Trema, as an influence – ... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Twisting the Knife - Four Films by Claude ChabrolFriday, 27 May 2022
Nouvelle Vague directors have grown to seem more diverse than bonded, a golden generation linked by extreme cinephilia and the mutually supportive main chance. Godard endures at one extreme, pushing the movement’s implications to their... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: Parallel MothersTuesday, 24 May 2022
Parallel Mothers unfolds at a daringly slow pace, and there are moments in the first half of Pedro Almodóvar’s 2021 drama when you wish that things would speed up. And then you’re wrong-footed by the unexpected shifts in tone and direction, and... Read more... |
The Deathless Woman review - the overlooked persecution of the Roma peopleSaturday, 21 May 2022
One of the more heartwarming images in the news recently has been seeing Ukrainian refugees being welcomed by their eastern European neighbours. But there’s been very few mentions of how centuries-old European hostility to the Roma people, gypsies,... Read more... |
Benediction review - the world's worst woundsSaturday, 21 May 2022
Terence Davies’s Benediction is a haunting but uneven biopic of the World War I poet Siegfried Sassoon and a drama about the burden of incalculable loss. If sorrow and futility enshroud it, Davies leavens the bitterness with his tartest dialogue yet... Read more... |
Top Gun: Maverick review - Tom Cruise defies age and gravityFriday, 20 May 2022
Only 36 years later, Tom Cruise is back with his eagerly-awaited Top Gun sequel (it was delayed a couple of years by Covid), and there are loyal legions of fans out there desperate to see it. The original, some say, in some way helped to “define”... Read more... |
I Get Knocked Down, Brighton Festival review - Chumbawamba singer's film is lively, funny and thought-provokingThursday, 19 May 2022
One effect of the film I Get Knocked Down, a playfully constructed journey around the life of Chumbawamba vocalist Dunstan Bruce, is to remind that socio-political rage was once woven into the fabric of popular music. Old footage from the band’s... Read more... |
The Innocents review - they're just playingThursday, 19 May 2022
The Innocents made a splash at Cannes in 2021 and it’s easy to see why. The Norwegian supernatural thriller, deftly written and directed by Eskil Vogt (who co-wrote The Worst Person In the World), explores the murky time in childhood... Read more... |
Blu-ray: I Am a CameraThursday, 19 May 2022
The first film rendering of Christopher Isherwood’s experiences in early 1930s Berlin, I Am a Camera has been restored and released on Blu-ray to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Bob Fosse’s Cabaret. Popular when released in the UK in 1955,... Read more... |
Vortex review – an old couple's road to nowhereTuesday, 17 May 2022
Life, opined Thomas Hobbes, is “nasty, brutish, and short”. In Gaspar Noé’s Vortex it’s not short enough for a dementia-afflicted octogenarian psychiatrist (Françoise Lebrun) and her addled film critic husband (giallo auteur Dario Argento), whose... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Henry: Portrait of a Serial KillerSunday, 15 May 2022
The Driller Killer, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer form a self-descriptive yet misunderstood trinity in American cinema’s sordid underground. Originally subtitled Sympathy for the Devil, Henry modernised the... Read more... |
